the muse, here to amuse, brings a clock.
my hands and brain are chapped from taking her notes.
glimquist and sunkissed on a burgundy chaise longue
she turns phrase after phrase on the lathe of her tongue
and flutes, drills, planes, until she produces
five flights of solicitor’s banisters to snake down the staircase, hemming me in and
she is truth-pillowing everything out so that I’m breathing as
shallow and stinky as bathwater, anemone-blind, choking on her alien
mouthwash as she bats me from pillar to post, copper-manic, feeding me what she calls
ilk milk, squeezed from cliffs of dover: she a sovereign autonomous rose, till she drops
like a poppy, one ochre petal for each bong of the clock at tea time, drumming the carpet
with glee

G.B. Clarkson’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Ambit, and Magma, and in anthologies including The Best British Poetry (Salt Publishing, 2014), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear, 2016), Furies: a Poetry Anthology of Women Warriors (For Books’ Sake, 2015), and This Line Is Not For Turning: An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry (Cinnamon Press, 2011); as well as in the Daily Mirror and The New European. They have also been broadcast during the BBC Radio 3 Proms series. She has two pamphlets – Declare (Shearsman Books, 2016) which was a PBS Pamphlet Choice, and Dora Incites the Sea-Scribbler to Lament (smith|doorstop, 2016), a Laureate’s Choice.

It wasn’t that we had grown complacent,
in fact we’d had quite a difficult time,
but the wound was so large and demanding
we had to tend to that. It was only
later we noticed the change of pressure,
that something had come in and squatted us.
It stopped our mouths with what appeared to be
a thin film. We couldn’t puncture the stuff.
The usual strategies wouldn’t work.
We heard someone on the radio change
the word ‘rules’ to the word ‘witchcraft’.
We tried to learn quickly about the law.

Christy Ducker is a poet and tutor. Her first full-length collection, Skipper, was published in 2015, and includes work commended by the Forward Prize judges. Her pamphlet, Armour (2011) was a PBS Pamphlet Choice. Her commissions include residencies with Port of Tyne, English Heritage, and York University’s Centre for Immunology and Infection; she is also the director of North East Heroes, an Arts Council England project. She is currently working as a research fellow at Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Arts Practice.

Paul Summers lives in North Shields. His last couple of books are Union (New & Selected) & Primitive Cartography. His latest collection Straya appeared in March 2017. (All titles with Smokestack Books.)

Robert Crawford‘s first collection of poems was A Scottish Assembly (Chatto, 1990); his most recent collections are Testament (Cape, 2014) and the Scots poetry book Chinese Makars (Easel Press, 2016). He is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews, and editor of The Book of Iona (Polygon, 2016).

Stay Shockable – and Fight Back

So today: first, second and last shoutTo all that’s been chased round and wrung outWhich I, though lowly, saw sway and crackWhat’s empty tomorrow but yesterday was full:Before your head is frozen to death, a bare skull:Stay shockable – but fight back.

Those who fuck up our earth, water and air(Forward march! Trust in god and the motor car)Before they talk you round the houses and into a sackTo be stitched up, bought and soldWhile you wait for the transmutation of puke into goldStay shockable – and fight back.

So sweet, how mortals stir themselves and startTargetting coshes to the kidneys and the heartSo soon failed courage betrays love behind its back…If you stand head bowed, others bowed will follow(And then you won’t need to seek your sorrowsEverything you fear, now it all comes true -)Stay shockableStay shockable – and fight back.

Fight back, all of you! Unpractised in victory;Between Scylla here and there CharybdisIs the swinging exchange rate of the Odyssey…Darkness flows out after the rich and sweetBut when you and your comrades – go out and find them! –Share the gloom, the danger will easilyAnd soon crack…Stay shockable …Stay shockable…Stay shockable – but fight back.

Peter Russell was born in London in 1954. He grew up near Portsmouth and studied Comparative Literature with German in Norwich and Regensburg. He now writes and performs in Glasgow, where he has lived since 1985. His translation of ‘Schulpause/Breaktime’ by Günter Grass was commended in the Stephen Spender Prize for Literary Translation 2016.

Peter Rühmkorf was born in Dortmund in 1929 and died in Roseburg in North Germany in 2008. He believed that poetry in the modern age could be “a Utopian space where we can breathe more freely, feel more deeply, think more radically and nonetheless feel more connected with each other than is possible in the so-called real world.”

robin knows

to get away from the noise
I dig a hole on my allotment
and sit with a book
but I still hear my constant robin
who rests on the spade handle and says
in a voice between Trevor MacDonald
and Damien Lewis that he knows all
about Trump and the election and it’s all
they’re talking about in the trees
not that he gets up there much
and as much as he likes the worms
the hole has freed he comes down
to get away from the noise

there’s more fluttering to come
as three more friends arrive
bursting to self-express
but they’re more self-conscious
than my red-breasted mate
and no-one’s brave enough to speak
since that spuggy tried last week
before getting pecked to death
and now their hearts are in their mouths and
there’s more fluttering to come

there may be shelter under wings
and they may yet soar but
migration’s going to be a fucker
as it turns out there’s talk
and threats of some sort of cloud
wall and talk and threats of all being ringed
and pigeon lofts being converted
into avian detention centres so who knows if
there may be shelter under wings

Rob Walton is a writer, performer and teacher from Scunthorpe, who now lives in North Shields. Poems, short stories and flash fictions for children and adults published by Frances Lincoln, the Emma Press, Butcher’s Dog, Northern Correspondent, IRON Press, Red Squirrel, Northern Voices, Harper Collins, Arachne and others. He collated the text for the New Hartley Memorial Pathway and collaborates with sculptor Russ Coleman. Past winner and current judge for National Flash Fiction Day micro-fiction competition. He sometimes tweets @anicelad and oddness can be found at www.linesofdesire.co.uk

Post navigation

New Boots – the Anthology!

A selection of 100 poems from the project is now available in book form from Smokestack (price £8.99) - go here to order.

"Why the devil I throw my money away for that which the blockheads wish?" (G.F. Handel)

Welcome poets, polemicists and the disbelieving masses

The 2015 General Election made manifest the great sea-change that had been occurring in UK politics over the last fifteen to twenty years. Previous certainties, like Labour’s Scottish hegemony, are no more. Older patterns, like Conservative dominance of England, reasserted themselves.

The idea of the UK as a single country has been replaced by a plurality of identities, some long known to the other countries and regions, others formulating themselves as time passes. For that reason, we thought it might be an interesting experiment to chart the responses of those unacknowledged legislators, the poets, over the first 100 days of the new dispensation.

We ended up publishing a poem a day for 138 days, each one responding to some aspect of the new unrealpolitik. We then set to editing a book of 100 poems in order to, as we thought then, conclude the project.

However, the results of the EU Referendum showed that the slow slew in British political identity toward disillusionment and division had reached a breaking point that made even more evident the contrasts already indicated by the Scottish referendum and the General Election. We felt we had to begin again...

Stay with us, and see what the hell happens next. Oh fuck, it's Trump.

Commissioning and Contributions

This site is maintained by self-appointed voluntary arts drones working on zero hours non-contracts. Therefore we simply can't process unsolicited work, and will have to proceed initially at least by invitations. We hope we've got enough sense to ask *you* for a contribution, but please don't be offended if we're so stupid, tired or disempowered that we haven't approached you yet.